The members asks, will I state it outside the House? It has been distributed. His colleague, the minister, has it, so I will certainly be more than pleased to give him a copy of that letter.
Recently, on the CBC news, The National , a pollster, Mr. Allan Gregg, dismissed the idea that the Auditor General's revelations were significant. He stated that the Auditor General was exaggerating and that the sum of money was relatively small in the scheme of government operations.
I found it astounding that an educated man who understands presumably the way Canadians think would state that on air. Of course, that position was immediately denounced by his fellow panellists and by most Canadians. Because much of this money was actually stolen, this is a much more serious state of affairs than even the $2 billion gun registry boondoggle. The CBC revealed that it is now $2 billion as a result of its crunching the documents and the numbers.
However, this quarter of a billion dollars that was stolen or otherwise misappropriated is much more significant. This is not just bad policy; this is criminal conduct.
Last week's revelations by the Auditor General revealed how the Liberal government allowed these dollars to be stolen. They were not improperly allocated, not lost, not wasted through incompetence, but stolen. They were stolen from the public purse and handed off to Liberal friends, advertising companies and crown corporations. The Prime Minister and his cabinet colleagues said nothing when he as finance minister signed the cheques that found their way into the back pockets of the friends of the Liberal Party.
One of the--